Kincaid's Battery eBook

They saw, did Anna and those sisters (and many and
many a wife and mother from Callender House to Carrollton),
the vast, stealthy, fireless bivouac at fall of night,
in ear-shot of the enemy’s tattoo, unsheltered
from the midnight storm save by raked-up leaves:
Saw, just in the bivouac’s tortuous front, softly
reddening the low wet sky, that huge, rude semicircle
of camps in the dark ridged and gullied forests about
Shiloh’s log meeting-house, where the victorious
Grant’s ten-thousands—­from Ohio,
Kentucky, Indiana, Illinois, Missouri, Iowa, Wisconsin,
Michigan, as new to arms as their foe, yet a band of
lions in lair—­lay dry-tented, full fed
and fast asleep, safely flanked by swollen streams,
their gunboats behind them and Buell coming, but without
one mounted outpost, a scratch of entrenchment or a
whisper of warning.

Amid the eager carriage talk, in which Anna kept her
part, her mind’s eye still saw the farther scene
as it changed again and the gray dawn and gray host
furtively rose together and together silently spread
through the deep woods. She watched the day increase
and noon soar up and sink away while the legions of
Hardee, Bragg, Polk and Breckinridge slowly writhed
out of their perplexed folds and set themselves, still
undetected in their three successive lines of battle.
She beheld the sun set calm and clear, the two hosts
lie down once more, one in its tents, the other on
its arms, the leafy night hang over them resplendent
with stars, its watches near by, the Southern lines
reawaken in recovered strength, spring up and press
forward exultantly to the awful issue, and the Sabbath
dawn brighten into a faultless day with the boom of
the opening gun.

As the ladies drew up behind the throng and across
the throat of Commercial Alley the dire List began
to flutter from the Picayune office in greedy palms
and over and among dishevelled heads like a feeding
swarm of white pigeons. News there was as well
as names, but every eye devoured the names first and
then—­unless some name struck lightning in
the heart, as Anna saw it do every here and there and
for that poor old man over yonder—­after
the names the news.

“Nan, we needn’t stay if you—­”

“Oh, Miranda, isn’t all this ours?”

The bulletin boards were already telling in outline,
ahead of the list, thrilling things about the Orleans
Guards, the whirlwind onset of whose maiden bayonets
had captured double its share of the first camp taken
from the amazed, unbreakfasted enemy, and who again
and again, hour by hour, by the half-mile and mile,
had splendidly helped to drive him—­while
he hammered back with a deadly stubbornness all but
a match for their fury. Through forests, across
clearings, over streams and bogs and into and out
of ravines and thickets they had swept, seizing transiently
a whole field battery, permanently hundreds of prisoners,
and covering the strife’s broad wake with even
more appalling numbers of their own dead and wounded